Two thousand eleven marks the second published version of Max Barry’s Machine Man. The first version was posted online a few pages at a time through 2009, constructed in pieces alongside its piecemeal publication. The internet serial format, it turns out, was not only both inventive and unexpected from a major-press author, but also a fitting form for the novel’s content. The eponymous “machine man” is Charles Neumann, a technology-dependent, socially-awkward engineer who loses a limb, replaces it with an advanced prosthetic of his own invention, and then begins itching for further upgrades.

A brief note on “Neumann”: despite the stylistic innovations and surprisingly philosophical heft of the novel, its author cannot resist an apparent temptation toward preposterous, comedic names: Charles Neumann (who is building himself a better body, piece-by-piece), Lola Shanks (the prosthetist who supplies Neumann’s first replacement leg), Cassandra Cautery (whose job is to solve problems and seal corporate wounds), and so on. This possible criticism is the worst flaw of a book that should be a lot more limited by its premise than it turns out to be.

Like Barry’s previous pseudo-action novels—Jennifer Government, Company, and Syrup—Machine Man ties its thrilling plot line to issues larger than other book about super-powerful robot legs. Barry’s improvement with Machine Man is the move from the straightforward, perhaps heavy-handed, political and social agendas of his earlier works to more intriguing and inventive philosophical and aesthetic concerns in his latest work. Where Jennifer Government inseparably packages a cop story alongside a critique of globalized, corporate governance, for example, Machine Man’s department store shoot-outs deliver thrills alongside theories of moral elasticity and the nature of the literary artwork.

Our primary view of this universe is through the eyes of Neumann, who rationalizes so elaborately, insistently, and persuasively that we (and the book’s supporting cast) find ourselves intrigued at least and often convinced entirely by his philosophical statements, despite his own sometimes shady and always shifting motivations. One of Neumann’s most frequent tirades is against the “soft science” of psychology (as both explanation and method). Here, especially, the implied author of the text works against Neumann, crafting a story whose players operate according to embedded codes of trauma. Lola’s choice of men can be traced back to her father’s tragic end. Carl, the mountainous, tree-necked, shovel-handed security guard has been obsessed with making himself stronger ever since he failed to pull his fiancée free from a car wreck. Even a heartless middle manager claims motivation from the school-days’ trauma of a gap in her teeth.

The book structurally resists the silver tongue of its primary speaker. In doing so, Machine Man opens space for doubt of Neumann’s theses that will complicate conclusions beyond the book’s final pages. Neumann’s ultimate fate is perhaps optimistic celebration, perhaps a dark victory of the psychological. Form here works to muddy what seems to be clear content.

At the same time, the formal and paratextual features of the book (distance between protagonist and implied author, motivated font selections, chapters divided into an assembly-line of bite-sized sections), along with the work’s unconventional production process (piecemeal release with reader-feedback encouraged and sometimes incorporated), also muddy book- and art-sized questions: is the reader a user of a text, or a producer of it? What makes a book qualify as literature?

One cannot help but read that second question a bit biographically. Barry is something of a cyborg himself, half genre-writer, half author of literary fiction. The liminal status must wear on a writer after a while—reviewed like a Stephanie Meyer at worst but selling like a Muriel Spark at best. One could not blame such an author for falling to pieces.

PAUL ARDOIN
Florida State University